I don't understand it. I just want her.
"The assessment," Hope says, pulling me back. "I have to submit my portion by Friday. The board meets Monday."
"What will you write?"
"The truth, of course." Her pen taps against the clipboard. "That your behavioral metrics have improved. That your medication compliance is stable. That you've been cooperative during sessions."
"Stand up."
She freezes. The pen stops moving. Across the room, I see Gage's head turn—just enough to catch us in his peripheral vision without looking directly.
"Jude, I don't want to get caught and get you in trouble," Hope whispers. "Kennedy's already threatening to pull my access. Completely. If he finds a reason—"
The lights go out.
Not a flicker. A full cut. The fluorescent tubes die mid-hum and the day room drops into black. Hope's breath catches acrossthe table. Gage's boots scrape the floor by the door. Deeper in the facility, an alarm trips—distant, muffled, someone else's problem.
The emergency generator kicks in three seconds later. Amber light from the backup strips along the baseboards, dim enough that I can see the outline of Hope's face across from me.
The cameras are dead. The indicator lights are dark—no power, no feed, no recording. The monitoring station is blind.
Gage's radio crackles. Voices layering over each other—staff calling positions, someone reporting the outage sector by sector, the control room confirming essential systems only. Locks and fire exits. Everything else is down.
I watch Gage in the amber half-light. His hand is on the radio. His body is half-turned toward the corridor. He knows what protocol says—power failure means secure the patient, escort civilian staff out, lock down the ward. He knows exactly what he's supposed to do.
He doesn't do it.
He steps back against the door and plants himself there. His radio is live and I can hear every voice, every set of boots moving through the building. Nobody is coming to check the day room feed because there is no feed. And Gage is making sure nobody comes through that door, either.
He's giving us a window.
I look at Hope across the table. The amber light catches the whites of her eyes, the flush still sitting on her cheeks from before the lights cut.
"The cameras are down," I say.
"I know." Her voice is barely above a whisper.
"Kennedy can't see what the cameras can't record."
She doesn't move. Doesn't stand up. But she doesn't look away from me either, and I can see her pulse jumping in her throat in the dim light.
"Come here."
She shouldn't. Every protocol she's sworn to uphold says she stays in her chair, finishes the assessment, walks out without touching me.
She stands up anyway.
She comes around the table to my side. Her clipboard stays behind on the surface, pen on top of it. Her eyes dart once toward Gage at the door. He's facing the room—not hiding it, not pretending to look anywhere else—and his whole body is rigid, every muscle locked into the choice he's made. Hope stops in front of me. Close enough that I can smell her shampoo. Close enough that I can see the pulse jumping in her throat.
"How long do we have?" she asks.
"Long enough."
Her breathing has changed. Faster, shallower. Her lips part and I want to taste them.
Instead I drop my hand to her thigh.
Her skirt is soft under my palm. I gather the fabric an inch at a time, watching her face as I expose her skin. She shivers when my fingers brush her knee. By the time I reach her hip, she's trembling.
